writing | The Smart Set

Cutting Up

A.D. Amorosi — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

“A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this […]

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Brilliant Zingers and Vodka Stingers

A.D. Amorosi — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

During the second episode of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans — producer Ryan Murphy’s streaming series based on author Truman Capote’s lived-in-and-laughed-over 1960s among Manhattan’s “ladies who lunch” — titular actor Tom Hollander truly has his way with spite. Leaning with persnickety dread into a line that all but explains the raison d’etre of biting […]

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Why Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West is the perfect novel for a world in turmoil

Honors 480 — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Since its much-celebrated publication in 2017, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, an uncompromisingly modern story of love, migration, and transformation, has continued to gain relevance. Amidst continuing geopolitical, technological, and cultural turmoil, readers of Hamid’s tale gain insight into the complexity of the contemporary world while finding unexpected comfort in the novel’s central truth: that “we […]

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Shehan Karunatilaka Will Kick You Out at Midnight

Sudipto Sanyal — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Ventriloquism “I only became famous in October,” mumbled Shehan Karunatilaka as he leaned on the wall of the Chandni Chowk metro station and lit a cigarette. Here, in downtown Kolkata, with its crumbling office blocks and chaotic sidewalks, the long-haired, eyebrow-pierced writer from Sri Lanka was about as conspicuous as a dirty napkin in a […]

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When the Satanists Moved In

Erica Zelinger — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Writer Paul Crenshaw found himself trying to make sense of the fear that engulfed everything in his 1980s childhood in small-town Arkansas and the world around him. The Cold War. Stranger Danger. Satanic Panic. In his most recent book of essays Melt with Me: Coming of Age and Other ’80s Perils, published by The Ohio […]

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What is Not Imaginable

Guillermo Rebollo Gil — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 13:36:07 +0000

I’m trying to find the interview where Robert Hass, in speaking of his children, says something along the lines of having enjoyed having them around while he wrote. At first, I found the comment somewhere between comforting and inspiring, having a young child myself in the house as I try to write. Then, I could […]

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Walking Autistic with Skoliogeography

Natasha Burge — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

I am going to the corniche because I am always going to the corniche, but then diversion: in the butcher’s window, the gloss of a goat’s gelatinous eye and the reflection of electricity fizzing from streetlights that should have gone dead at dawn. From the shop next door mannequins jamble the doorway, their faces piously […]

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[See:] Weed [Read:] Control

Gabriela Denise Frank — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 11:30:00 +0000

12. Like perfection or success, weeds are ideals, not units of measure. [See: every artist whose work was appreciated after they were dead. 13. Which is to say artists are opportunistic entrepreneurs searching for nooks and crannies to shelter their idea-seeds, knowing the right conditions will spur internal rupture: the hull cracks, the organism unfurls […]

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My Brother is Toast

Lev Raphael — Mon, 22 May 2023 11:30:00 +0000

I killed my brother. That was in my first novel, Winter Eyes, a story of Holocaust survivors hiding their horrific past from their son. I made that queer main character an only child. Boom — he was gone. If I could have erased my brother in real life, magically, or with a Marvel superhero power, I […]

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Beautiful and Damned

Colin Fleming — Mon, 15 May 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Having unfortunately passed through many dating sites as I navigate this life in search of a person I find hard to believe exists, I’m accustomed to the reoccurring bromides people share about their lives. They can, for instance, stay in or go out, which is quite a marvelous feat. They are all living their best […]

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